Mostly Mindful

Beneath The Fan

September 27, 2018. This poem emerged from a diverse spirituality group that meets every other month. We each share something responding to the session’s focus – then we sit in silence. Silence can be relative. Certainly sounds normally unnoticed take on new significance when human clatter subsides.

Last week I took in red yucca seeds and a quote from Florida Scott-Maxwell in response to the challenge: What can you see when you are able to look past all your comfortable assumptions, judgments, prejudices, and fears? There were several seed-related responses, and the various seeds/interpretations were swirling in my head as we began what would’ve been silence … but for the old fan directly above me.

Thank you – that quote popped up a day or so after the challenge – I’d been stumped (maybe a bit of rebellious denial?) but the seed analogy registered … and that fan whittled away any residual resistance!

Love the quotation and the reflection of life as seed. Felt as if I was right there with you, listening to the fan, the thoughts swirling, passing. My response is that I feel as if I am the seed pushing against it’s shell, willing opening.

Thanks, VJ. I’ve always had a fascination with life stages of butterflies, each stage having no clues to the before and next … now looking at “where I am” through both that lens and the seed lens, I am a bit calmer about all the unknowns … striving toward accepting what feels destructive as perhaps necessary prep for whatever’s next.